It’s a Life, Thames Sailing Barge, Leonard Piper documents the delights and challenges of forty years living on a houseboat in West London. As an intricate symbiosis between man and ship starts to come apart, the film follows its inhabitants and what happens as this floating home approaches the end of its life. Houseboat resident, author, film-maker and therapist, Denis Postle was encouraged by his film-maker son Elmer Postle to jointly create this story of joy, decline, death and renewal in London’s tideway. Serving first as a container of goods and products during its working life, the Leonard Piper latterly became the container for a family and its creative lives. Maintained by its owner, the wooden barge's ongoing relationship with the Thames wilderness becomes the vehicle for a universal exploration of mortality. It’s a Life’ is an oral history and auto-ethnographic production; somewhere between a memoire and a family album, of one family’s forty years living on the River Thames in London. Production, photography, editing and music, with one exception, photography is by film-makers, family and friends. A celebration of ‘owning the means of production!’ Self funded.
